Remote health care services, such as performing diagnostic imaging in remote locations that otherwise may not have adequate health care facilities, are increasing. This increase is due in part because in a typical centralized medical care system arrangement, the transportation of patients to a centralized facility takes time, which can result in treating patients later in a disease pathology, increasing cost and deteriorating outcomes.
Ultrasound or sonography has become an increasingly used tool for medical diagnosis. In conventional usage, the health care professional moves, orients, and presses the ultrasound probe over the regions of the patient's body as guided by the health care professional's experience and intuition. When an ultrasound examination is performed at a location remote to a specialist's location, such as by a remote health care practitioner (RHCP) in a medical dispensary remote from a major medical center such as a hospital, the protocol may require diagnosis and direction to be communicated to the remotely located health care professional administering the movement of the ultrasound probe. In these situations, it may not always be sufficiently clear where the ultrasound probe is located on the patient or the track that the probe has traversed.
Also, there are a number of components to the ultrasound probe's control that affect the ultrasound imagery and may aid in the diagnosis. These include the control movements of sliding, rotating, tilting, and compressing. Different operating conditions are also associated with these different control movements. For example, when the probe is slid, the angle of ultrasound beam energy should remain constant with respect to the body. This angle should also remain constant when the probe is rotated. Tilting of the probe is also performed while the probe is at a specific location over the body and may provide more accurate measurements. Compression of the tissue below the ultrasound transducer allows for better viewing of deeper structures and helps differentiate between structures. For example, veins are easily compressed by pressing the probe down, arteries less so, and nerves are essentially incompressible.
However, in remote health care applications, information regarding the ultrasound examination may not be properly communicated to another location, for example, where a specialist is located. Thus, the specialist located remotely from the point of examination may have difficulty associating the remotely acquired ultrasound imagery and probe control with the location on the patient's body corresponding to the imagery.